Quick thing before I get into it: the next ctrl+alt+create live is this Saturday, May 30, noon to 3pm PT at Foundations in Seattle, with Joel Telling, the 3D Printing Nerd kicking us off. Free, in person or online. Grab a spot. Full details near the bottom.
Now, the story I actually need to tell you.
Here’s a thing that can happen to you, and almost nothing you do can stop it.
A VPN company called Private Internet Access ran an automated copyright bot. That bot filed seven takedown notices against posts on a Facebook Page I run. The catch: I was contractually paid to post that content. It was promotional material PIA’s own partner handed me, under an affiliate agreement that specifically required me to put it on Facebook. The bot didn’t know that. Bots don’t know anything. It saw images it associated with PIA, decided they were stolen, and fired.
Seven strikes is past Facebook’s repeat-infringer line. On November 1, 2024, Facebook disabled my personal account. Not the Page, the bot’s actual target. My personal account, the one with sixteen years of my life in it, the one I used to message my own kid through Messenger Kids.
Now the part that should scare you. PIA figured out their bot was wrong. Their enforcement team put it in writing on November 13 and submitted a withdrawal. Facebook restored the Page. And my personal account stayed dead anyway, because it had fallen into a gap no human at Meta would own. The copyright team said they handle content, not accounts. The account team said they handle accounts, not copyright. My reinstatement lived in the seam between two departments, and a seam has no email address.
I appealed seven times. I filed four counter-notifications. I sat in a PIA support loop where five different agents sent me five versions of the same non-answer over five months. I gave PIA the exact URL of the form Facebook needed them to file. Nothing moved. Seventeen months, and the most powerful social network on Earth could not find one person willing to click undo on a mistake everyone agreed was a mistake.
What finally worked was the thing almost nobody has the stomach or the resources to do. I built a legal case. Demand letters drafted for an attorney to put on letterhead and send to Meta’s legal department and to PIA’s parent company. A complaint to the Washington State Attorney General. A complaint to the FTC.
The moment the problem looked like it might cost them a lawyer’s afternoon instead of a support ticket, a human appeared. I believe it was the letter to the state’s AG that ultimately nudged Facebook to reverse the decision.
Had it not been for AI / Claude, I would not have been able to effectively communicate the problem to the people who most needed to hear it.
That experience is why I built Signal Flare.
Losing an account this way is common, and the victim is always alone in it. When you’re locked out, you don’t even know what to write down, who to escalate to, or what a realistic outcome looks like. Signal Flare walks you through organizing what happened, setting expectations that match reality, and building the documentation that makes a company stop treating you like a ticket and start treating you like a liability. It’s the tool I wish someone had handed me on day one instead of month seventeen.
The lesson I want you to take isn’t “Facebook is bad.” It’s that your account is not yours the way you think it is, the appeal systems are not built to help you, and the only language these companies reliably answer is the language of consequences. Keep your own backups. Keep your receipts. And if it happens to you, escalate harder and earlier than feels reasonable, because reasonable is what keeps you stuck in the loop.
https://facebook.com/chrispirillo is back, baby.
On a lighter note, Gemini glitched while I was working on something else and started speaking a language that doesn’t exist. Fluent, confident, completely invented. Instead of correcting it I kept it, and it became Conjurelang, which generates entire fantasy languages you can type English into and watch render live. Free, and it does for nothing what some apps charge for.
The build taught me I’m a terrible judge of my own best idea. I spent ages on a procedurally generated writing system, the feature I was sure would sell the app, and it came out as slop, so I cut it. The live-typing feature I almost didn’t bother describing turned out to be the hook. People stay because they can watch their own name transform in real time. The thing I shrugged at carried the whole app, and the thing I was proudest of is sitting in a graveyard branch. It keeps happening, and I’ve stopped trusting the ranking I give my ideas before anyone else touches them.
Driftopolis is a procedural 3D city that generates a skyline and runs on its own, like an aquarium made of buildings. The bug that nagged me was a shadow flicker, which turned out to be the light source drifting when it should have held still. Pinning it down settled the whole restless feel of the scene.
Typhoria flings type around in 3D across 40 modes, sphere and helix and vortex, with image and video export. My free answer to Space Type.
Page Turner reads your ePub and PDF books as actual 3D books, with page-turn physics you can tune by paper stiffness. A free alternative to DearFlip.
Wooly Willy is the 1955 magnetic drawing toy, rebuilt with real iron-filing physics so you can draw a beard on any face you upload. Pure joy, zero utility.
Profile Studio crops and resizes profile pictures and headers for every platform I could think of, LinkedIn through Pinterest, with batch download. I built it this week because grabbing one LinkedIn header off a web search nearly broke me.
People ask how a guy who can’t write code ships this much software. I direct it, in plain English, through Claude’s web interface, the same browser you already have open. I broke down the full method in this week’s ctrl+alt+create newsletter, including why my best ideas keep arriving as accidents instead of plans.
I’ve got a soft spot for people who look at an expensive cloud tool and build the free, local, private version instead. A few I’ve been watching:
OpenReel edits video right in your browser, no uploads, with AI subtitles and color grading. An open-source CapCut alternative, MIT licensed.
Modly turns any photo into a 3D model with AI running entirely on your own GPU, then exports STL for printing. If you live in the maker world like I do, photo to printable mesh with nothing touching a server is a big deal.
OpenVox is local text-to-speech for Mac with voice cloning and audiobook generation across 600+ languages, a one-time purchase instead of yet another subscription.
Tolaria is a second brain that’s plain Markdown files on your disk, with Git built in. If you’ve ever worried about a notes app trapping years of your thinking in a format you can’t leave, this is the antidote.
Audiblez turns your ePubs into audiobooks with neural voices. Pair it with a reading backlog and a commute.
The next ctrl+alt+create live is Saturday, May 30, noon to 3pm PT at Foundations in Seattle, with Joel Telling, the 3D Printing Nerd, kicking us off. Free, in person or online. Pre-register now.
Things rattling around that didn’t make it into the stories above:
I’ve stopped trusting the phrase “I’ll remember to fix that later.” I won’t. Nobody does. The fix either happens in the session it came up or it joins the graveyard of good intentions. So now if something bugs me mid-build, I either fix it in the next ten minutes or I write it down somewhere I’ll actually look. Memory is not a backup system.
Somebody asked me last week which of my 328 apps is my favorite, and I realized I genuinely couldn’t answer, because the ones I love using and the ones I’m proud of building are almost never the same app. Wooly Willy is a joy and was easy. The font pipeline stuff is hard and I’m proud of it and I never just open it for fun. I don’t think that gap ever closes, and I’ve made peace with it.
Every month I think I’ve run out of things that annoy me enough to build, and every month the world restocks the shelf. I used to find that exhausting. Lately I find it reassuring. As long as software is a little broken everywhere, I’ll never be out of work.
What did you make recently that surprised you? Reply and show me, I love seeing what you all build.
And if you’re not building something now… why not? It’s easy (and fun). Are you still stuck being a passive “tech spectator” instead of someone who actually uses it? LoL
Yours Digitally,
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